The Avant-Garde as Ecopoetics, Experimental Landscapes of Filipinx Diasporic Poetry

ABSTRACT

The avant-garde is a socially grounded world-making practice, an aesthetic tradition envisioning collectively produced futures. By examining the modernist verses of José García Villa, this article locates Filipinx avant-garde poetry as an ecopoetic site, where nature, the environment, and human actors produce collective-making and consciousness-building exercises. Villa’s poetry does not only connote the bizarreness of being Filipinx American in the early twentieth century, but also illustrates how invoking queerness conjures new worlds outside our precarious moment. Filipinx avant-garde poetry demonstrates why the ecopoetic should not only seek to protect what is scarce but envision what lies beyond our present.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecopoetics
• Filipinx literature
• avant-garde

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. E. San Juan, Jr., “Homage to José García Villa,” in The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by José García Villa, ed. Eileen Tabios (New York: Kaya Press, 1999), 191.

2. John Shoptaw, “Why Ecopoetry?,” Poetry Magazine, January 2016, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/70299/why-ecopoetry.

3. Jessica Hagedorn, foreword to The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by José Garcia Villa, ed. Eileen Tabios (New York: Kaya Press, 1999), xi.

4. Luis Francia, “Villanelles,” in The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by José Garcia Villa, ed. Eileen Tabios (New York: Kaya Press, 1999), 169.

5. Cathy Park Hong, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” Stanford Humanities Center 7, n.d., https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/interventions/delusions-whiteness-avant-garde.

6. Eileen Tabios, “An Angel’s Invitation to a House of Song,” in The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by José Garcia Villa, ed. Eileen Tabios (New York: Kaya Press, 1999), 149.

7. San Juan, Jr., “Homage to José Garcia Villa,” 201.

8. Swati Rana, Race Characters: Ethnic Literature and the Figure of the American Dream (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 68.

9. Hong, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde.”

10. Ibid.

11. Timothy Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental Asian American Poetry Since 1965 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 6.

12. Erin Suzuki and Aimee Bahng, “The Transpacific Subject in Asian American Culture,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 9.

13. Rob Wilson, “Oceania as Peril and Promise: Towards Theorizing a Worlded Vision of Transpacific Ecopoetics,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 10, no. 2 (2019): 261.

14. Craig Santos Perez, “Transterritorial Currents and the Imperial Terripelago,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2015): 620.

15. Wilson, “Oceania as Peril and Promise,” 267.

16. Ibid., 266.

17. Annie Mai Yee Jansen, “Writing toward Action: Mapping an Affinity Poetics in Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 6, no. 2 (2019): 10.

18. Angela Hume and Samia Rahimtoola, “Introduction: Queering Ecopoetics,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 25, no. 1 (2018): 143.

19. Hume and Rahimtoola, “Introduction: Queering Ecopoetics,”

20. José García Villa, “Lyric 15,” in The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by José García Villa, ed. Eileen Tabios (New York: Kaya Press, 1999), 9.

21. Scott Knickerbocker, Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 162.

22. García Villa, “Lyric 15,” 9.

23. Yarimar Bonilla, “A Legacy of Colonialism Set the Stage for the Maui Wildfires,” The New York Times, February 27, 2023.

24. “Study Finds Climate Change to Blame for Record-Breaking California Wildfires,” Drought.gov, August 8, 2023, https://www.drought.gov/news/study-finds-climate-change-blame-record-breaking-california-wildfires-2023-08-08.

25. Ibid.

26. Sarita See, The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the America Museum (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 47.

27. José García Villa, “Untitled Story,” in The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by José García Villa, ed. Eileen Tabios (New York: Kaya Press, 1999), 106–16.

28. Martin Joséph Ponce, Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 67.

29. Giordano Nanni, “Time, empire and resistance in settler-colonial Victoria,” Time and Society 20, no. 1 (2011): 6.

30. García Villa, “Untitled Story,” 108.

31. Knickerbocker, Ecopoetics, 142–3.

32. García Villa, “Untitled Story,” 111.

33. Victor Roman Mendoza, Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899–1913 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 31.

34. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 67.

35. Rana, Race Characters, 71.

36. García Villa, “Lyric 15,” 9.

37. Ibid.

38. Kimberly Alidio, Why Letter Ellipses (Chicago: Selva Oscura Press, 2020), 17.

39. Angela Peñaredondo, Nature Felt but Never Apprehended (Blacksburg: Noemi Press, 2023), 1.

40. Ibid., 2.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

MT Vallarta

MT Vallarta is a poet and Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. They are the author of the poetry collection, What You Refuse to Remember (2023), winner of the 2022 Small Harbor Publishing Laureate Prize. Previously, they were the 2021-2023 Guarini Dean’s Pre-to-Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College.